It's funny, for a few years I've worked in high frequency trading. And when cutting away nanoseconds from our latency figures, our hardware was getting closer

It's funny, for a few years I've worked in high frequency trading. And when cutting away nanoseconds from our latency figures, our hardware was getting closer and closer to a "mirror-laser network that could receive and output short messages". We'd literally replace a traditional 40GbE switch with an optical one, that would pass the light without extra "photons-to-electrons" conversion. We'd complement CPU with a trigger-happy FPGA embedding a custom MAC, with the binary messages representing market orders already pre-cooked, just waiting for the balance to change. And at some point, while continuing streamlining that, thinking about that system using an analogy of a hall of mirrors, lenses and a few non-linear state-keeping elements was not that of a stretch from the truth. The analogy between a hall of mirrors and statefull systems, like CPUs is net perfect. Still, when you think along the lines above or when you hold a CPU in your hand, it is not a big stretch to consider that an "active" device, like a computer could be just a piece of solid crystal, a "passive system".